Google+ accidentally spams its users due to storage glitch

Google's social networking service has sent thousands of multiple notifications to its users due to a disk drive error.

Google+ accidentally sent thousands of email notifications to its users yesterday due to a glitch in the system. The social networking service became so overwhelmed over the weekend that its notification system ran out of storage space.

Normal notifications, such as a friend accepting a connect request, were sent out multiple times to each user, with some complaining they had received the same message over 50 times. ﻿The issue reportedly effected users for a period of 80 minutes.

Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice-President of Social for Google apologised for the disruption yesterday.

"Please accept our apologies for the spam we caused this afternoon. For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes," Gundotra said in his post. "We didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have."

Google+ is the search giant's latest and most ambitious answer to Facebook; it is a social networking ﻿﻿﻿project that promises more flexibility and privacy than its rival. Currently in a user trial phase, Google+ can only be joined via a direct invitation from one of its members.

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